A Crown of Fire: The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books—picklepublishing@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A CROWN OF FIRE:

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA

BY

PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE 5

BY WAY OF PREFACE 6

CHAPTER I—GIROLAMO’S YOUTH: THE FLIGHT FROM FERRARA 16

CHAPTER II—THE TIME OF APPRENTICESHIP 46

CHAPTER III—IN THE FLORENCE OF LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT 64

CHAPTER IV—RODRIGO BORGIA IN ST. PETER’S CHAIR: SAVONAROLA REFORMS HIS CONVENT 84

CHAPTER V—THE FRENCH INVADE ITALY: SAVONAROLA IN THE ROLE OF MEDIATOR 99

CHAPTER VI—SAVONAROLA SUPREME: FLORENCE’S NEW CONSTITUTION 118

CHAPTER VII—THE CONVERTED CITY: CHRIST THE KING OF FLORENCE 130

CHAPTER VIII—THE POPE FACES THE FRENCH ARMY: SAVONAROLA OFFERED A CARDINAL’S HAT 145

CHAPTER IX—FLORENCE IN DEADLY PERIL: THE CITY’S MIRACULOUS DELIVERANCE 160

CHAPTER X—THE PYRAMID OF VANITIES: TRAGEDY IN THE VATICAN: SAVONAROLA EXCOMMUNICATED 169

CHAPTER XI—THE BEGINNING OF THE END: BLOODY DRAMA IN FLORENCE: SAVONAROLA DEFIES THE POPE 187

CHAPTER XII—ORDEAL BY FIRE: THE MOB ATTACKS SAN MARCO’S CONVENT: SAVONAROLA SURRENDERS 197

CHAPTER XIII—A BARGAIN IS STRUCK OVER SAVONAROLA’S LIFE 209

CHAPTER XIV—HOW LITTLE A WAY A SOULE HATH TO GO TO HEAVEN WHEN IT DEPARTS FROM THE BODY 221

EPILOGUE 229

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 236

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book stems in the main from watching the scene in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria on the anniversary of Savonarola’s martyrdom, and from observations made in a number of Dominican convents in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria in the course of the summer and autumn of 1958.

To Professor Giorgio La Pira, the former Mayor of Florence, and the Curators of the Florentine Archives and Libraries, goes my gratitude for having given me an opportunity to inspect the large collections of letters and copies of letters, minutes of the Grand Council, depositions upon the three false trials, theological tracts, and miscellaneous communications with the courts of France and Rome. Of my indebtedness to Professor Mario Ferrara of Lucca I can hardly say enough. With his scholarly transformation of the text of Savonarola’s sermons from an archaic, outmoded language into modern Italian he has not only deserved well of the noble Friar’s memory, but saved me from becoming bogged down in a mass of almost indigestible old scripts. The learned Dr. P. Dom. Planzer, O.P., of Lucerne, was kind enough to set me aright on the history of the Dominican Order and certain intricacies of Catholic doctrine. I also want to thank the Sindaco of Ferrara, the Honorable Spero Ghedini, for his exquisite courtesy in granting me an insight into the motives which inspired him and the municipal and provincial governments of Ferrara to set up a special section in the Ariostean Library devoted to Ferrara’s greatest son. This very laudable enterprise by the Ferrarese is of a purely historical and cultural nature, and, contrary to press reports, has nothing whatsoever to do with contemporary Italian politics or polemics.

While I have endeavored to interpret the subject in his historical context, I also believe that, without turning this work into a compendium of names, dates, and statistics, I have brought to light some information on the Friar’s life and times which has never before been published. In combining research with a feeling of deep sympathy for Savonarola, which goes back to my youth in Holland, I have, as Felix Timmermans once said of a book he wrote on Pieter Breughel, tried to ferret and sniffle him out of his own works.

I cannot close without expressing my obligation to my dear friends Selma and Luise Steinberg who placed their pleasant home on the Lake of Zurich at my disposal for interviews and consultations with various Savonarola Kenner from all over Europe.

The book is lovingly dedicated to my wife who made the journey with me through the land of her Veronese ancestors.

Pierre van Paassen

BY WAY OF PREFACE

Out of the Shadows of Night

DAWN came in that morning enveloped in a chill melancholy shroud making Florence resemble nothing so much as an enormous blank page. In the confused transition toward day the light was the color of white coffee, an undelectable mixture of gloom and sadness. The drizzle of the night had turned the pavement into rows of gleaming black mirrors. It was seventeen minutes before five o’clock. From far away across the Arno came the nervous tinkle of a monastery bell; a mere quiver of silvery vibration. When it stopped only the sound of the pigeons flapping their wings broke the stillness. The birds spent the night sitting on the heads and shoulders of the marble statues in the Loggia de’ Lanzi, the magnificent open vaulted hall where Cosimo de’ Medici posted his lancers on the occasion of great state ceremonials. Dim-looming through the floating haze a part of the grimy façade of the Palazzo Vecchio became visible. A thin frothy screen still concealed the slender top-heavy bell tower and the crenelated rampart on the palace roof. No human movement was as yet discernible. Only the haze rippled now and then like a lace curtain swaying in a gust of wind. When the veil lifted for an instant Michelangelo’s gigantic statue of the boy David stood forth like a pale terror. Suddenly, and seemingly from all directions at the same time, a soft breeze blew into the Piazza causing whiffs and puffs of mist and vapor to race and dance back and forth like a myriad of ghostly wraiths and phantoms transforming the blank page of a moment before into a whispering pageant of past magnificence....

In all ages and all seasons the Florentines poured into this Piazza in cascades now gay or somber, now raving mad or trembling with holy joy. In tumultuous demonstrations, brandishing their weapons and shouting their wild slogans, but also in solemn silent processions as serene as the hosts of the redeemed; in war and peace, amidst tears and laughter, to the sound of cannon thunder and sweetest hymns, the people of Florence made this square alternately a radiant hurly-burly and the dreariest of black spots, sinister with stake and gallows and writhing victims. Here they rose to a pinnacle of splendor unsealed since the Athens of Pericles. Here, too, intoxicated with fame and glory, they tripped on Fortune’s treacherous dance floor.

They all walked here: the friends and the enemies of liberty, warriors of hot temper who filled the earth with clamor and woe, fervent mystics and smiling sceptics, atheists in pontifical garb, clerics wielding gleaming swords, popes, emperors, crusaders, and men of the sort called immortal: Dante, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Petrarch, the superman Michelangelo. Silently treading with ghostly step, the lacquered, gilt, and silvered Medici walked by; Pope Julius in unbelievably gorgeous raiment, a battle sword by his side, mounted on a white horse under a golden baldachin; Martin Luther returning to Wittenberg, his eyes bloodshot with rage; Pico della Mirandola who stunned mankind with the extent of his learning; the Angelical Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas; St. Francis, God’s troubadour from Assisi; St. Catherine of Siena who bore on her hands, feet, and heart the impression of the wounds of the Crucified.

Intermingled like the soldiers of a routed army or trailing each other in utter disregard of temporal sequence came visions of Alaric and his Vandals on their way to the sack of Rome; Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, on the arm of St. Athanasius, the formulator of the Creed that bears his name; illiterate Charlemagne looking for still another site to build a school...Here is Mathilda of Canossa, who made an emperor wait barefoot in the snow before allowing him to enter her castle to beg Pope Gregory’s forgiveness; Frederick Barbarossa, the German Kaiser, who trained falcons, kept a harem, and wrote sonnets in Arabic; Napoleon, of all, the most systematic plunderer of churches and museums, whom Pius VII dismissed with the words: "Get out of my sight, commediante! And then, his beard and hair bristling like the quills of a porcupine, the liberator Garibaldi accoutered in his blood-red shirt. Have you ever seen a lion’s face? Mazzini once asked John Morley. Isn’t it a silly face? Isn’t it the face of Garibaldi?..."

Then more saints and heroes, more scholars, artists, poets, natives of this city whose renown has not faded with the passage of time, now sleeping in the vaults and crypts of the churches and chapels round about the Piazza. And side by side with them malign individuals of the scoundrel species: hotheads, cutthroats, bearing exalted names, all turned to dust; gone, gone into the final night that envelopes the destinies of man....

It was in this square that the articles of luxury, known as the Vanities were piled in a huge pyramid and set on fire, and a whole nation vowed, like Joshua of old: As for me and my house we will serve the Lord, only to remember its solemn pledge no more six months later. One day, in a vaporous dawn like this, ‘tis said, repentant Sandro Botticelli, one of the masters of the Renaissance, climbed through the palace window to paint veils and drapes around his nudes on exhibition there. Another day, a seventeen year old boy dressed in cardinatial purple, Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Leo X, upon learning that the members of his family were to be banished from Florence, stood sobbing out his heart against that Loggia wall. Leaving his mules, balancing baskets of books on their backs, in a side street, cautious Erasmus peered into the Piazza from around a corner not daring to enter lest he be recognized and taken back to Rome where his friend and admirer, Paul III, wanted to put a red hat on him.

From all possible sources come reports of cabals collecting in this square, imbecilities enacted, conspiracies hatched and smothered in blood; Guelph factions and Ghibelline factions at war; monks enlisting crusaders; an army of prostitutes doing penance; silver trumpets calling to the assault, red and blue panoplies waving in the breeze, and, occasionally, too, pans of incense sending up perfumed smoke in celebration of uneasy peace. One year Florence was a den of fratricidal discord, in another the people chanted the psalm of brotherly love: How good and pleasant is it for brethren to dwell together in unity. One day upon the closing of the brothels by Savonarola it was Te Deum Laudamus, the day following his death the populace indulged in orgies so lewd and obscene as to make the debaucheries in ancient Daphne’s grove seem innocent child’s play in comparison.

A passionate people these Florentines, now kneeling in prayer, now storming the heavens in hellish rage and fury; like all peoples a mixture of good and bad, yet always something noble and beautiful shining through the soil and tarnish of their human condition.

Extinct for fifteen hundred years, divine prophecy was revived in this city on the Arno. Here a miracle of discipline was worked out by faith. Here the assertion was made of a discoverable and attainable paradise. In serious hearts the matter sank down deep, prompting attempts here and elsewhere to bring the messianic dream to realization. History has seen few explosions of faith such as that which once flared up in the Lily City. But here also happened things over which all Florence cried hot tears...and still weeps at times....

In 1901 a memorial slab of bronze, replacing an earlier one of marble, was put down in the Piazza, just in front of Ammannati’s fountain, on the spot where Savonarola was executed. Here, says the inscription, where with his brethren, Fra Domenico Buonvicini and Fra Silvestro Maruffi, on May 23, 1498, by an iniquitous sentence Fra Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burned, this memorial has been placed after four centuries.

*****

It was five thirty when the first motor scooter roared across the square and up the Via Calzaioli, the Street of the Stocking makers, a noisy herald of a thousand others to follow. When the silence returned footsteps were heard. An old nun, nearly bent double with age, shuffled into view. From afar she seemed to glide behind frosted glass, unreal, shadowlike. In her left hand she carried a wicker basket, with her right hand she leaned heavily on a hawthorn stick. She halted and, as if to orientate herself, slowly looked around in all directions. Then she took from her basket a small bunch of flowers and placed it gently on the memorial slab. The violets lay there shy and lonely. For a moment the nun stood still with head bent so low that she seemed in danger of toppling over. After crossing herself she picked up her basket and with painful step shambled off, muttering indistinctly to herself, dragging her sandals through the puddles.

No sooner was the nun out of sight when more footsteps were heard. This time they tapped briskly and were counterpointed by the metallic click of an umbrella tip. A middle-aged gentleman dressed in a black cutaway, wearing a bowler hat, patent leather shoes and a glittering pince-nez, went through the same motions as the old nun. He carried a bouquet of red roses in cellophane. He unwrapped the flowers and deposited them by the side of the nun’s violets. Stepping back, he cocked his head sideways like a painter surveying his own masterpiece, and swept off his hat in a broad gesture of salute. Probably assuming himself unobserved, he bowed, not inelegantly, to the flowers and said in a clearly audible voice: Popolo e Libertà! Popolo e Libertà! The People and Freedom! This was once the slogan of the Frateschi, the followers of Fra Girolamo Savonarola. The signor walked off scraping his throat and furiously swinging his umbrella.

Two men followed, both bareheaded, mufflers wrapped around their faces in deference to the old Italian superstition of breathing the moist morning air. Both men pushed bicycles and spoke rapidly through their mufflers. They may have been schoolteachers or clerks or minor officials of the cristianodemocratico party. They gave the flowers and the memorial slab a perfunctory nod as to a casual acquaintance and went their way but now mounted on their bicycles.

A pushcart rattled into the Piazza. It was piled high with flowers, the lilies, Florence’s city emblem, standing forth like pale yellow candles amongst green ferns, red and pink roses, and carnations lying fresh and fragrant on the cart’s edge. The woman pushing the cart halted, wiped her face with a red handkerchief, and got busy arranging the flowers. She smiled as a babel of children’s voices came from the direction where the Via della Ninna debouches into the Piazza. The boys and girls bought one flower each. As they threw them on the slab of bronze they called out: Viva Cristo! That was the slogan of the Florentines when, upon Savonarola’s nomination, they proclaimed Christ the king of their commonwealth.

Now a golden rim encircled the Piazza on high. The sky came through, a mixture of blue and vermillion, like a wide diaphanous garment overspreading the roofs. In the twinkling of an eye the last trace of mist dissolved and the humidity evaporated. From all sides, men, women and children could be seen coming into the square. A dozen nuns marched by like soldiers in step. Some people carried flowers, others made for the pushcart to buy. Still as a tomb an hour before, and perhaps as clammy and bleak, the Piazza now came to life inundated with sun and color. The whole city was awakening. The great bell in Giotto’s Campanile hard by the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower, better known as the Duomo, led off the morning concert. From innumerable towers the bells rang in the 23rd of May in loving remembrance of Girolamo Savonarola.

In Flanders and Holland one gains the impression that the carillons answer each other. No tower sings out till its predecessor has finished. It is a mystic musical dialogue in which they engage, with an undertone of gravity, measured and solemn as the figures in Rembrandt’s paintings. In Florence it’s the other way around. No voce velata here, no veiled voices, no demitones, no carillons as a matter of fact; only chimes and bells. All the Florentine bells talk at once like men and women during the intermission in a theatrical performance. The bells of Florence clamor and clangor, they stutter and splutter. One moment they sound like a crowd of quarreling schoolboys, the next they burst into peals of laughter. And all at once all of them fall silent as if run out of breath or argument....

"Es ist noch immer nicht ruhig um Savonarola! soliloquized a vigorous broad-shouldered man with an impish smile on his red face. He wore the Dominican black mantle over a white robe and a round velvet hat. Through a pair of thick-lensed glasses he peered at the flowers on the pavement. Things have never quieted down yet around Savonarola...It’s nearly five hundred years since he died on this spot, and still all these flowers, all this excitement...Five hundred years is a long time!..."

Is it? In heaven five hundred years are but half a watch in the night. To a people with a sense of historical continuity to whom the Church has communicated her secret of thinking in centuries, Girolamo Savonarola walked here only yesterday. Dante still stands at the end of Trinity Bridge gazing on the immaculate Beatrice. There are Florentines who tip their hats when they pass the spot. They still greet Cosimo, the father of their fatherland, high up on his bronze horse near the fountain of Ammannati to the left of the Signorial Palace. On Sunday afternoons they drop in on Fra Angelico, on Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and Da Vinci in the museums and churches as if visiting relatives or old friends.

Those bells are not tolling in mournful cadence for a departed soul. They are pealing in celebration of a birthday. They are expressing the joy which Savonarola experienced when he looked up at the gallows on May 23, 1498, and saw what St. Stephen the protomartyr saw, the gates of heaven open to receive him. Scholars, theologians, political parties, youth groups, and convents are still investigating Savonarola, discussing him, writing about him and inscribing his name on their banners. None ignores the victim of the trial which is universally regarded as an infamous frame-up. Even the most rabid anti-clericals in Italy, who by force of habit minimize the religious significance of Savonarola’s life and work, nevertheless express their admiration for the courage and the zeal with which he pursued his campaigns for moral purity and social righteousness. In February, 1959, the municipal council of Ferrara, Savonarola’s birthplace, brought back one of his Bibles from a private collection in America at the fancy, though not exorbitant price of $31,000.{1}

There are more monasteries today than there were ten years ago in Italy, in Austria, and in Germany where Savonarola is venerated as a saint. In the San Romano Convent of Lucca, a few miles to the north-west of Florence, they have prayed for his intercession from the hour when his body fell from the gallows onto the flaming woodpile. Beato, Blessed Girolamo, they say with a note of endearment in their voices when speaking of the martyred friar. In the towering medieval convent of Wettenhausen, on the edge of the Black Forest in Bavaria, the Mother Superior Anselma, and the learned spiritual director, Sister Aquinata, spoke of him as Unser Savonarola, Our Savonarola. As in Wettenhausen so in a score of monasteries his memory is cherished with exceeding love and reverence. In two Dominican churches in one single day was heard the Mass of Savonarola as a special office in his honor on the anniversary of his death.{2}

Books and pamphlets on Savonarola, controversial, eulogistic, and scholarly objective, continue to roll from the presses, not only in his birthplace Ferrara and in Florence, the city of his triumph and tragedy, but in France and Germany, in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria as well. The fire behind the five hundred years old controversy whether he was a saint, a heretic, or a revolutionary shows no signs of dying down. Instead of being allowed to slumber in the limbo of forgotten things, there is actually a rise in the market of Savonaroliana. At no time since the Jubilee Year of 1600 when pilgrims, with the high approval of Pope Clement VIII, bought the Friar’s picture in Rome showing him with sainthood’s aureole around his head and one of his prayers printed on the back, has the atmosphere around Savonarola and his memory been more agitated.

There seems to be something stirring again around Savonarola, remarked one of the reverend fathers of the Birmingham Oratory, who is a member of the commission appointed to inquire into the life and work of John Henry Newman with a view to the great Oratorian’s beatification and his ultimate canonization. It should not be forgotten, he added, that St. Philip Neri, Newman’s patron saint, was canonized in 1622 despite the devil’s advocate’s objections. So ardent an admirer and devotee of Savonarola was St. Philip that all his life he carried a relic of the martyred monk on his breast....

Not once, but three and perhaps four times Savonarola seemed on the point of beatification, the first stage on the way to full sainthood. Once Giovanni de’ Medici intervened when Julius II was about to issue a Brief elevating the Friar to the altars of the Catholic Church. Another time Clement VIII, who spent eight months in Savonarola’s birthplace, assured the citizens of Ferrara that in so far as he was concerned the Friar’s canonization was as good as certain. The Pope, however, died before he could pursue his plan to a successful conclusion.

Again in 1952, the five hundredth anniversary of Savonarola’s birth when Ferrara and Florence led Italy in commemorating the name and the work of Savonarola, hopes ran high that the reigning Pontiff, Pius XII, would make an authoritative pronouncement. A petition to this effect was submitted to the Sacred Congregation of Rites. But again the attempt miscarried. It was rumored that the Pope had ordered a re-examination of Fra Girolamo’s theological works.

Then Professor Mario Ferrara, the prefect of studies at Lucca, went to work and produced the first complete edition of the Friar’s sermons and treatises with commentaries showing his true aims and objectives, and unmasking the many falsifications and the insults to the noble Friar’s tremendous sincerity perpetrated by Jacobins and other enemies of the Church. According to the Luchese scholar all the old, and long since discredited, allegations such as Fra Girolamo’s lack of charity,{3} his disobedience to the papal authority, his rebellion against the Church, melt in thin air when his works are read without prejudice or mental reservation. Professor Ferrara dedicated his work to Catholics, honest Catholics only. In his opinion only such are capable and have the right to judge the strict Catholic orthodoxy of the one-time Vicar-General of Tuscany’s Dominican province.

Whether our hope of the proclamation of Savonarola’s sainthood is realized or not, said Professor Ferrara, he remains what he was, an apostle of the Christian spirit, a true prophet...If Rome and Italy and the world will at last acknowledge that Savonarola went down under an avalanche of calumny, filth and false accusations, we will see the pure and learned Friar step to the fore again and still lead us on....

"We are going back to Savonarola, emphatically declared the Lord Mayor of Florence, Professor Giorgio La Pira, who in the spirit of Savonarola has built an entire new city, Isolotta, consisting of pink and white low-cost workers’ apartment houses along the shores of the Arno. Like George Santayana in his last years, Professor La Pira, though a layman, lives in a monastery. He is a deputy to the Italian parliament where he said, in speaking of the basic lines of Savonarola’s five hundred year old political program as if it were an item in the morning’s newspaper: The Christian commonwealth as proposed by Savonarola is of the utmost significance and pertinency for our day...It is a free republic with its roots in the public spirit. It demands the religious regeneration of the individual...Savonarola’s republic is like an oak, its roots go wide and deep in history...It rises from our collective conscience...The name of Savonarola will never die...The great Friar is once more poised to move forward."

*****

A serious, perhaps an impassable barrier to Savonarola’s rehabilitation may be seen in the peculiar circumstance that a quarter century after his death he was virtually annexed by and integrated in the emerging Protestant movement. In one of his verbal hammer blows with which he shattered the supranational dream of a universal church, Luther called out: Whereas Antichrist has damned Savonarola, God has canonized him in our hearts. In the group of statues known as the Luther Denkmal in Worms, the city where the rebellious Saxon monk appeared before the Diet, Savonarola sits at Luther’s feet in the company of Wycliff, Huss, and Petrus Waldus. Protestants of Dutch, Scottish, Swiss, and German antecedents, will undoubtedly recall seeing Savonarola’s likeness amongst these and other so-called forerunners of the Reformation in their church history books or on the walls of catechism classrooms.

By rights the Florentine prior does not belong in that category. There is no doubt that he was a champion of church reform, but which consecrated Catholic, we may well ask, was not in the fifteenth century? We always seem to overlook the fact that in the fifteenth century the issue was not for or against reform of the Church; everybody was for it. The question was how to bring it about, where to start, how far to go. All his life Savonarola showed a contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels and prayed and worked for a convocation of a Council of the whole Church. With much more justice Savonarola could be called one of the trail blazers of the Council of Trent where the Church did reform herself from within and with her own machinery. There is a difference after all between reform and revolt. Savonarola never seceded or threatened to go his own way. He never ceased to subscribe to the Church’s articles of faith and the teachings of the Fathers. He was a reformer, not a rebel or revolutionary as was Luther who jumped overboard from St. Peter’s bark and struck out for himself. Luther’s breaching of the unity of the Church, which many regard today as one of history’s major calamities and which Protestants themselves are striving to repair in their own way in and through the World Council of Churches, would have been unthinkable to Savonarola.

The process of Savonarola’s rehabilitation extends practically over the same length of time as that of Joan of Arc. Joan was sentenced by an ecclesiastical court to be burned at the stake as a relapsed heretic in Rouen in A.D. 1431. Yet, in the lifetime of the Maid’s own mother, that cruel verdict, which was prompted, if not dictated, by John Talbot, the commander of the Godons, as Joan called the English,{4} was set aside as a gross miscarriage of ecclesiastical justice. Nearly five centuries were to elapse before Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909 and canonized by Benedict XV in 1919. Evidently it takes time even for the Church to recognize a saint. Joan’s rise to sainthood came up from the French people who would never admit that the Saint of the Fatherland was a heretic. If any person was ever canonized in a people’s heart that person was Joan of Arc. The radical-socialists Joseph Fabre and Raymond Poincaré, anti-clericals though they were, took the initiative in proclaiming Joan the eternal symbol of French unity. Their proclamation was an act of faith which grouped the entire French nation around the memory of one of its greatest glories.

When the Church raised the Maid of Orléans to her altars a wave of reconciliation of all men and parties in France was set in motion. All the virtues and treasures of the race suddenly welled up from their subterranean sources. The Maid of Orléans, the Phoenix of the Gauls, rose from her ashes as Jeanne d’Arc, Sainte de la Patrie. The greatest miracle attributed to her is the Battle of the Marne in 1914 when the seemingly irresistible German juggernaut rolled within a few miles of Paris only to be brought to as abrupt a halt as were Attila’s hordes in A.D. 451 on St. Genevieve’s prayer of intercession.

Will this century, which saw the canonization of Joan of Arc, also see the official rehabilitation of Savonarola? He, too, like Joan, was burned as a heretic. He, too, heard voices. He, too, saw visions. He, too, was the victim of political intrigue and savage implacable enemies. Many of the Friar’s contemporaries, amongst them members of the Roman Curia, declared outright, as Joan’s mother did in her daughter’s case, that a ghastly mistake had been made in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria on May 23, 1498.

In A.D. 1962 the twenty-second Ecumenical Council will bring together, either in Venice or in Rome, 1600 bishops, cardinals, prelates, and heads of religious Orders. Pope John XXIII has renewed the tradition of convoking a Council of the whole Church. The mere mention of such a Council would have been deemed reprehensible as short a time ago as 1957 or 1958. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) put the Counter Reformation in motion, the Vatican Council (1869-1870), which was interrupted by the occupation of Rome by the Italian national army and put an end to the papacy’s temporal power, set the Church’s face in anger against the modern world and made the Pope a self-constituted prisoner in the Vatican. The twenty-second Council seems designed to accomplish a vastly different purpose. The modern world does exist. It is in full process of evolution. That evolution, it is realized, can no longer be stayed.

John XXIII is determined that European civilization and culture shall no longer be programmatically endorsed or furthered by the Catholic Church in the foreign mission fields. Only the Gospel is to be preached and the universality of the Christian religion emphasized. In line with the trend of decolonization in Asia and Africa, the Church seeks to free herself from all links and ties with chauvinist-nationalist and imperialist policies. Her priests stand in the vanguard of the struggle against apartheid in the Union of South Africa. The French clergy, realizing the invincible folly of allowing the Communists always and again to step forward as the champions of the weary and heavy-laden wherever they may be, insists, in the teeth of the military cliques and the North African colons, that France, the eldest daughter of the Church, shall answer the cry for justice and freedom arising from Algiers.

Pope John who is said to have a conception of Christian unity as distinct from ecclesiastical uniformity, is not, as were his five or six immediate predecessors in the Chair of St. Peter filled with a secret nostalgia for the old days of the temporal power. He is not a Roman, he is not an aristocrat, he did not, as Pius XII, spend his whole life in the centralizing bureaus of the Vatican. In his youth, before becoming a priest, he walked in the picket line in front of a factory where the workers were on strike. As a student of history he knows that the notion of going back to the past or preserving the status quo is but a wishful dream, without hope or substance. Judging by the public lectures he delivered in Paris in 1954, the Pope, upon whom Christians of every name are beginning to trust for leadership and inspiration, will undoubtedly dare to look the advancing emancipation of natural science in the face with its silent but far more positive threat to all forms of supernaturalism and metaphysics than was ever presented by the spooky gates of hell.

Some of the recent changes introduced by the Pope not only astonish but frankly bewilder a Protestant onlooker. For the first time in history the Roman Catholic churches in Germany use the vernacular in the liturgy. In Munich’s cathedral where tens of thousands of pilgrims come annually to pray on the tomb of the valiant anti-Nazi champion, Cardinal Faulhaber, the priests read the Gospel with their faces turned towards the people, as was the custom during the first six centuries of the Christian era. That the reduction of Latin as a sacral tongue might unintentionally lead to something like a federation of national Catholic churches, does not seem to trouble the German clergy nor the Pope.

How long is it since Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s friend and collaborator, said: Let us beware of quenching the spirit of God, and sat down at Regensburg with Roman Catholic theologians in an effort to heal the breach in Christendom? For the first time in four centuries groups of Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians gather week after week in the Netherlands and Germany for discussions and prayers for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. In one Catholic church after the other congregations were heard to sing psalms in the German language and in the lovely plainsong cadences. In many places also went up the prayer, Jesus Christ, Saviour and Redeemer, have pity upon us and upon the world. Have in remembrance thy Christian people everywhere, and bring together what is divided.{5}

On June 12,{6} Maurice Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, was received in audience at the Vatican and met with him who, as Angelo Cardinal Roncalli of Venice, and with Professor Giorgio La Pira, the Savonarola man, were the animators of the annual Religious Conversations in Paris. These men, curiously enough, were also amongst the most disconsolate over the censuring of the Worker-Priest movement in France in 1954 when the anguished cry went up from the midst of the prêtres-ouvriers themselves: Are the historical mistakes of the Borgia era relating to Savonarola to be made all over again?{7}

The expectations of the latter-day friends and followers of Savonarola are raised to new heights by events under the pontificate of John XXIII. It is their hope and prayer that a new breath of the Spirit may go forth from the Ecumenical Council to blow the smouldering embers into life again. Being very approachable the Pope will certainly be approached anew by the Savonarola men in the clergy and laity. To them, as to others, John XXIII is Pontifex Maximus, literally the Chief Bridgebuilder. Realizing that it is neither desirable nor possible to transfer the passions of one age to the controversies of another, they will nonetheless venture to ask whether Savonarola’s life, teaching and martyrdom may not serve as building material in the bridge which the Pope is said to plan to throw towards the separated brethren? The Friar’s beatification, frequently deferred but never definitely rejected, would, in their estimation, be a still stronger gesture of conciliation than Joan of Arc’s canonization, the effect of which was restricted to the French national scene alone....

In any case, whether the endeavors of the Savonarola men are brought to a prosperous consummation or not, it cannot be denied that the Friar continues his hold on the minds of men of the most diversified philosophies and antecedents. That hold is strong and enduring. Nothing weakens it, neither time nor distance, neither the revolution of opinion nor the fall of empires. However, since the wings of all men’s lives are plumed with the feathers of death, Savonarola cannot come to us, unless we make a reverent attempt, as here is done, to penetrate to him, bring him out of the shadows into the light of day, and show how strangely he was fitted for his great task.

CHAPTER I—GIROLAMO’S YOUTH: THE FLIGHT FROM FERRARA

WHEN Niccolo Savonarola, a prominent citizen of Ferrara, decided on a medical career for his third son, the still very young but precociously studious Girolamo, he followed a firmly established family tradition. Not only had there been at least one renowned physician bearing the Savonarola name in each of the preceding five or six generations, but the boy’s undeniably superior mental attainments indicated him as the most promising successor to his grandfather, Ser Michele Savonarola, one of the ablest medical practitioners in all Italy.

Ser Michele’s fondness for Girolamo and his delight in the boy’s brilliance prompted him to take the education of his favorite grandson personally in hand. The result was that Girolamo wrote Latin as fluently at the age of ten as Erasmus of Rotterdam, that other nurseling of immortality who was his contemporary. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the wonder in which philosophy begins. His vast knowledge which was one day to astonish those two most wondrously erudite men of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola and Machiavelli, the boy acquired by endless reading. By sympathetic intuition too he always perceived a great deal more than the ordinary reader. In the formation of his mind, however, no influence was so direct, so persuasive, and of such lasting character, as his grandfather’s. Girolamo’s most impressionable years, up to the age of seventeen, were for the most part spent in Ser Michele’s library which, together with a small laboratory or pharmacy, was located in the rear of the house occupied by the Savonarolas in one of Ferrara’s principal streets.

The widowed Ser Michele settled in Ferrara upon invitation of Duke Niccolo III of the ruling House of Este. He brought with him five sons, three of whom are known to have become priests. It was with his youngest son Niccolo and his daughter-in-law Elena, and their seven children, that Ser Michele eventually made his home. Before coming to Ferrara he practiced medicine in Padua and taught in that city’s university whence his fame had spread throughout Italy and even beyond the Alps into Germany and France.

Called for a consultation to Rome one day, it was